


The World You Wake Up To

by Snapjack



Category: The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
Genre: Minific, September 11 Attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-13
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-21 02:29:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2451323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snapjack/pseuds/Snapjack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mike doesn't really expect to see her again; and yet the thrill of opening his front porch door to see Catherine Banning there had been so acute, so unexpected, that it jolted him into a whole new world of possibility. It was like opening the door to see a unicorn there; no matter how many times you opened your door later in life to find the paper or the utility bill or your brother-in-law, you would never stop expecting the unicorn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World You Wake Up To

**Author's Note:**

> So in response to the overwhelming demand of absolutely no one, here's a minific from the POV of Denis Leary's character in a fun-but-not-exactly-classic heist movie from the late 90's! JentheSweetie and pagination are both responsible for the existence of this fic--they encouraged me to write it, then encouraged me to send it to them, then encouraged me to post it here. They are collectively the best Enthusiasm Hamsters that ever Hamster'd.

_Here lies Michael McCann:_

_Passed over by Catherine Banning_

_In favor of Thomas Crown._

 

As a potential epitaph, it’s not bad, Mike thinks. It has a certain ring to it, a strange medieval poetry. It sounds like some of the histories of the War of the Roses, if only because of the Irish and English names involved; the acid coincidence of that noun at the end. Crown. Fucking fitting.

 

But of course, that’s unfair to Catherine. Standing here on his front porch in the cool morning, the steam of his coffee a blue ghost in the air, Mike’s man enough to admit that the money, in the end, had nothing to do with it. Crown was simply the better match for her, which is good, because knowing it’s not about the money or the status or the culture really takes the sting out of losing a beautiful woman to a fucking rich asshole multi-millionaire. Knowing it’s about you personally is, weirdly, better. Mike’s almost 90% sure he’s not being sarcastic—even  _he_  has trouble telling these days.

 

All the same, he can’t stop scanning crowds for a flash of something foxlike, curbs for the smooth peelaway of a luxury automobile, coffee carts for the most impatient woman in the line. He doesn’t really expect to see her again; and yet the thrill of opening his front porch door to see Catherine Banning there had been so acute, so unexpected, that it jolted him into a whole new world of possibility. It was like opening the door to see a unicorn there; no matter how many times you opened your door later in life to find the paper or the utility bill or your brother-in-law, you would never stop expecting the unicorn. Now, Mike looks closer at every woman he meets, wondering what might be concealed below her surface—a sharpshooter’s eye, a collection of expensive French lingerie, a ravening addiction to high-stakes poker. He’s prepared to believe that there might be surprises, again; he’s less prepared to believe that the surprises are going to be good. His ex-wife was full of surprises, too. You’re not smoking anymore. Surprise. I’ve given away your dog because she pisses on the rug. Surprise. I’m in love with your best friend. Surprise.

 

So Mike’s all topped up on that kinda shit, female-wise. He’s not really looking, even. But still. One more good surprise, in one lifetime, seems like it might not be too much to hope for. Stranger things have happened. Paretti has on three separate occasions gotten bumped up to first class on trans-Atlantic flights. Mike’s Aunt Ginny routinely finds money caught in the fence outside her front yard in Queens, and not just ones either. Twenties. A fifty once. Mike’s seen the Mets win a championship in Shea Stadium. Good shit could happen, is the point.

 

So when September 11th happens instead, Mike is  _pissed_.

 

 

The first four days after it happens, he spends in a blind rage. He doesn’t remember anything from that time, not  _nothing_. He arrests people, maybe. He calls into Howard Stern, has no idea to this day what he said. On his eighty-fifth hour without sleep, or so he’s told, he pitches forward into the corner of a filing cabinet and collapses asleep on the station floor. He’s so out of it that they have to call his sister Angie to come and take him home.

 

When he wakes up, Catherine Banning is there.

 

“Where the fuck’ve  _you_  been?” Mike leads with.

“St. Moritz,” she says, like that’s natural. She’s sitting on his couch. His couch that he’s lying on. He has no idea what day it is. Or night. That looks like twilight outside. It might be dawn. He’s not sure. She is holding a wet washcloth.

“You have a black eye,” she informs him, and drops the cold washcloth on his face.

“I repeat,” he says, glaring at her one-eyed, “Where  _the fuck_  have you been?”

“They lifted the flight embargo from Caribbean nations on Thursday. It’s Friday,” she says flatly. “You’ve been asleep since I got here.”

“Where’s Crown?” he asks, sitting up and putting his feet on the floor. His head swims.

“Martinique.”

Mike stands up—loses his balance and sits down on the couch again, then tries a second time and manages it, even though it makes his vision go black. He closes his eyes.

“When was the last time you ate something?”

“95th Street,” Mike answers.

“Right,” Catherine says, and steers him out the door to her rental, takes him to a Cajun drive-through and parks in the back so they can eat in the car. He realizes he’s ravenous as soon as he smells food, drains his large tea and hers, too, before realizing and apologizing.

“Don’t be sorry,” she says. “I’m not the one who’s dehydrated.” And produces another iced tea out of the bag, passes it over to him. Peels the lid off some green beans while he’s drinking, sticks a fork in and passes them over wordlessly. As he wolfs the food, she readies more, passes him fries, dirty rice. Another tea. He finally slows down when he feels the food hit, burps long and loud. Then sneaks a guilty look at her. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she repeats, smiling. “My dad could do the alphabet.”

“Yeah, well, so could my Uncle Dugan,” says Mike. He trails lamely off, worried she might be offended to hear her dad compared to a guy who’s doing time in Rikers for what Dugie’s doin’ time for. They sit quietly in the car, looking out at the soft blue light getting darker. So, evening, then.

 

 

“So, terrorists,” Catherine finally says.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “They think they’d been planning it for a while.”

“Sure, sure,” Catherine says, in that distracted/absent way she gets when she’s contemplating a really big heist. She got that way when she was talking about Crown’s work, too. If she says something about how  _good_  these guys were, he might explode and scream at her or something. He’s not sure. He’s still feeling like someone’s yanked him inside out like a sock. 

“Look, I probably shouldn’t be around people,” he says. “Not the way I’ve been acting. I don’t think I’m uh, good, right now.” He makes a vague, spinny gesture in the direction of his head before giving up. This is the closest any McCann has ever gotten to the topic of mental health, probably. He drops his head back against the headrest. It’s been raining all week, and the shimmering parking lot is glistening with oil and water, the smell of warm hush puppy grease and fresh, clean rain mingling together, 

“You know,” says Catherine after a decent interval, “Everyone thinks murderers are really satisfying to catch, you notice that?”

Mike opens his eyes.

She continues. “With my dad, the cases that everyone asked about were the murderers, the guys he had to run down in the woods and the swamps, with dogs, you know?”

Mike grunts. There are significantly fewer canine-and-swamp-based manhunts in New York City than Catherine seems to think, but he lets her continue her thought.

“But those were never the ones he wanted to talk about. He hated looking for murderers because he could never restore what had been lost. He couldn’t make anyone feel better, not really, not the way he could when he tracked down a kidnapper or something. Or found a body for a family to bury even. He would have rather tracked down bodies all day, but no one wants to hear that. And here,” Catherine says, gesturing vaguely towards Manhattan, “We don’t even have that. We don’t even have any murderers we can track down, because they all died, too.”

Mike was wrong. She  _does_  get it. They sit in silence for a long time.

 

 

 

She stays in the city for about a week, just appearing outta nowhere and handing him food, water, coffee. The first time Paretti sees her, he just walks up to her and enfolds her in a gigantic hug, one Catherine’s clearly uncomfortable with—Mike’s never met anyone with stronger personal boundaries, it’s like a moat filled with alligators around her—but which Paretti just decides she needs, apparently. Paretti does that; Mike’s seen his partner decide that perps needed hugs; parole officers; a judge once. Catherine’s all stiff, two coffees in her clenched hands peeking over Paretti’s shoulders, and she shoots Mike a little help-me glance. Mike shrugs at her. Nothing he can do. It goes on for a while, and she must finally relax like a micron or something, because Paretti lets her go and she pulls away, offers Paretti a tight little smile. Then she softens a little more and offers Paretti the coffee Mike knows was actually her own. Paretti smiles, declines. He knows what’s up. He points her over to Mike in the corner, and she walks up to him with the coffees, looking at him over her sunglasses, which had slipped down her nose somewhere in the hugging process.

“Say nothing,” she instructs.

“Okay,” Mike says, and takes his coffee. She stays for a little while, helps where she can, speaks in French to a woman from Port Au Prince whose son is missing, and they’re all real worried until it turns out that her son is like seven and has only been missing for eight hours, which Mike never thought he’d see the day he’d be happier to hear about a missing seven-year-old than about a missing stockbroker. But there it is. Catherine gives him a look when the kid turns up (at his alternate daycare because of a miscommunication between shared-custody parents, like fricking always) and Mike knows just what she’s thinking. Then she’s gone.

 

 

 He hears from her once, twice, a month, a year later. Here and there there’s a Christmas card, signed by the both of ‘em. Never anything written inside, but he reads what he can from the fact that she signed. That they both did. They aren’t the kind of people who send a lot of Christmas cards, Mike thinks. The cards are always hand-addressed, always in Catherine’s writing. The postmarks vary, usually Ireland but sometimes other places. Monaco. Crete. Trinidad. He reads all of ‘em standing over the sink, drinking his coffee, looking out over the frost-blue lawn. Sometimes he stands there for a while, reading the card again and again. When he’s done, he pours the dregs of his coffee down the drain, watches them swirl yellow. Then he puts the card in the trash and heads out his front porch door.

 

You never know what you’ll find. 


End file.
